What is the sociocultural perspective?

children are products of their culture

1) culture often defines which cognitive activities are valued (ex: in western culture, youngsters are expected to learn to read but not to navigate using the stars)2) culture provides tools that shape the way children think (ex: skills used to solve arithmetic probelms depend on whether their culture provides a paper and pencil or a calculator)3) higher-level cultural practices help children to organize their knowledge and communicate it to others (ex: in most north american schools, students are expected to think and work alone rather than collaborate)

3

For Vygotsky and other sociocultural theorists, the social nature of cognitive development is captured in the concept of ______, which refers to ________

intersubjectivity: mutual, shared understanding among participants in an activity

4

What is guided participation?

cognitive growth results from children's involvement in structured activities with others who are more skilled than they

5

What are Vygotsky's 3 most important contributions to cognitive development?

-concepts of zone of proximal development, scaffolding and private speech

6

Vygotsky's view on cognitive development. What is the zone of proximal development?

-the difference between what a child can do with assistance and what they can do on their own

7

Vygotsky's view on cognitive development. What is scaffolding?

-a teaching style that matches the amount of assistance to the learner's needs

8

Vygotsky's view on cognitive development. What is private speech?

-comments not directed to others but intended to help children regulate their own behaviour (talking to yourself)

private, inner

Vygotsky theorized that children's language use during tasks was not (as Piaget thought) ____ and nonsocial, but was in fact ____ - communicating with the self.

egocentric, communicative

11

What is the core-knowledge theory?

-innate capability to easily acquire knowledge in such specialized domains of evolutionary importance such as language, knowledge of objects, and understanding of people

12

What is Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of cognitive development?

-views it as a sociocultural enterprise; experts use scaffolding to help a novice acquire knowledge; children use private speech to regulate their own thinking

13

What is the information-processing theory?

-based on the computer metaphor; view cognitive change in terms of better strategies, increased capacity of working memory, more effective inhibitory and executive processing, more automatic processing, and faster processing speed